COP26 Thought for the Day #14

How should we think about addressing climate change?

Over the past fortnight at COP 26 debate has circled around pragmatic questions; fossil fuels, net zero, eco-efficiency, green consumerism, conservation management, political policy, economic reform and scientific or technological ‘silver bullets’.

But what about other ways of thinking about solutions to the issues?  Amid all the noise, and with so many points of view vying for attention how do I make sense of my place in relation to it all?

Over these days as I watched the news, and published the posts, I noticed different ways of thinking emerge as different contributors from different worlds offered their thoughts about questions raised by the climate catastrophe.

As I tried to make sense of the voices I remembered coming across a paper by political theorist John Dryzek, this was back in 2007 while studying for a MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice.  It helped me understand and untangle different ways of thinking and talking about environmental challenges.  Dryzek argued that environmental discourses fall into four different buckets (my image not his!) or discourses, either reformist or radical, and either prosaic or imaginative.

Dryzek, J., The politics of the Earth: environmental discourses. 2005, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

The top left, prosaic and reformist frames the challenge within the current economic and social worldview. In other words, we need to tweak business as usual but basically can trust technology and markets to rise to the challenge and fix things. This was the loudest voice inside COP.

Top right, prosaic and radical on the other hand argues that there are limits to growth on a finite planet and to avoid disaster we must cut back economic activity. This might look like the call to rethink Christmas that just dropped in my inbox today, to reduce consumption.

In the bottom left ‘bucket’ the reformist and imaginative discourse operates largely within the ideals, values and worldview of current consumer-capitalist mindset, saying we need to do business better. Tackle things more creatively and intelligently, cradle to cradle, regenerative design fits here.

Finally, bottom right, the imaginative and radical approach seeks to shift consciousness, transforming the way we experience ourselves and the planet. Here all life is seen to have value in and of itself, not just as a resource for humans to utilise. This ‘deep green’ approach might involve a panpsychic perspective. In their beautiful pamphlet ‘On Sentience’ Peter Reason and Sarah Gillespie put it this way: “What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world?” This discourse can take a spiritual turn, seeing the sacred or divine immanent in the earth. A key movement here is in a shift of identity from a separate self, towards a connected self, what is sometimes called an ‘ecological self.’

Though these different ways of seeing the climate crisis and the best way to tackle it can and overlap, they are often in conflict and competition with each other.  Think of the activists protesting outside COP26, angry with the prosaic reformist inside, or those inside wanting them to ‘go away’ so they can get on with the hard work of fixing the problem. Or, as we heard in posts here a cynical ‘your are away with the fairies’ or ‘in Narnia’ – a bemused ‘what’s the point’ of any of this in the context of business or a school of management?  

I didn’t organise the way different discourses presented themselves over these two weeks, but reading back it looks like I might have. Perhaps it’s because most of us are dipping our hands into more than one ‘bucket’ as we go about our professional and personal lives, giving us access to different ways of thinking.  I can easily name organisations and people I work with from all four discourses. This gives me hope, the challenges we face are complex, far reaching and systemic, we need to recognise, understand, accept, include, and co-ordinate all of these approaches. I have my own preferences and perspectives, but if we are to have any hope of tackling the challenges we’d best stop bickering among ourselves to link arms and work together.    

Dryzek’s analysis is useful, but I’d like to offer another way of expressing this, from Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone in Active Hope https://www.activehope.info/the-book

They outline three dimensions of work that needs to be done to turn around the climate crisis: Holding Actions, Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices and Shift in Consciousness. They are mutually reinforcing and equally necessary, each one leads into the others.

Holding Actions focus on holding back and slowing down the damage being caused by ‘business as usual’. This can include raising awareness of issues, as well as direct action and protest. These voices are often outside conference rooms, out on the streets. The goal here is to protect what remains. Holding actions are essential; they save lives, species and ecosystems. But, though protest is vital, they point out that on their own, these actions are not enough. Along with stopping the damage, we need to replace or transform the systems and institutions that cause the harm.

Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices involve rethinking the way we do things, redesigning of the structures and systems that make up our society. The green shoots of these practices are all around us. We can all support and participate through our choices about how to travel, where to spend our money, what to eat, where to save. Social enterprises, sustainable agriculture, green energy and investing, all are small steps that contribute to the creation of a life-sustaining society. But like holding actions, by themselves they are not enough. These new structures won’t take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them.

Shift in Consciousness involves a deep transformation from the hyper-individualism that’s become a hallmark of a ‘business as usual’ mindset, to a deepening of our sense of belonging in the world. This is the emergence of a more connected and compassionate sense of identity. This shift in consciousness involves our hearts, our minds, and our views of reality. For me, the practice of paying attention to small things, here, with care, in this place, keeps my sense of belonging in the world alive and fresh, giving me the energy and nourishment I need to do the work I do out in the world. Chris and Joanna call this “the inner frontier of change, the personal and spiritual development that enriches and deepens our capacity and desire to act for our world.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed some of the ‘Thoughts for the Day’ we’ve offered over the past 14 days – I’m going to take a break, head up to the allotment and be quiet now!

COP26 Thought for the Day #13

Management for a Sustainable Future

Todays Thought for the Day comes from Sybille Schiffmann. Sybille is Chair and a trainer here at Wise Goose and part of a team at Marjon University who have been collaboratively designing a new MSc in Management for a Sustainable Future. https://www.marjon.ac.uk/courses/msc-management-sustainable/

The main ethical question for our time is what kind of work we want to build together with the immense resources we have at our disposal.”

GRLI, 2008 (The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative)

In my work with leaders from business and the social sector who are currently studying on Marjon’s MSc Management for a Sustainable Future, the question above is particularly relevant. 

At its heart it is about taking on new responsibilities, concerns for other people, and for our environment, while weighing those concerns directly against our self-interest and in relation to the primary activities, undertaken by our businesses and organisations.

It becomes a question of leadership – responsible leadership in other words.

As I work with students who have committed to this quite demanding path of study, while holding down their existing full-time jobs, I am really appreciating what a transformative journey this is for those individuals, as they seek to shift thinking and action in their workplaces, through the adoption and in time, integration of sustainable business practices.

Such responsible leadership requires far greater cognitive understanding of the complexities of addressing sustainability matters. As one small business leader, who produces sustainable swimwear while actively adhering to Circular Economic Principles and practices put it: “The easiest and most sustainable thing to do would be not to set up and run a business at all”.

Responsible leadership also involves being visionary in the sense of waking others up to the future that is being debated furiously at COP 26, and to help orientate others in their workplaces towards potentially very different business activities, or entirely new business ventures for that matter.

My hope for our leaders on this programme is that they fully embrace their unique potential to create a positive difference, and impact, for the people, or customers they serve and for the planet they inhabit; be that large or small.

Their job moving forward is to “ build muscle” as Mary Gentile puts it and apply ethical decision-making in their workplaces. All this while facing the demands and challenges of day to day business as usual, where they must now present the ‘voice’ for those environmental and societal stakeholders not conventionally represented on the Balance Sheet, or the Profit and Loss account.

In essence they are creating the path to new possibilities, new products, services or even whole new ways of doing business. Walking this path requires restless curiosity, resilience, courage and a willingness to act at times contrary to the status quo; or as Jacob Bronowski once said “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”

It is a great pleasure to be on this journey with them.

Another quote that aptly describe the mind and heart of our students:

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.”

Jacob Bronowski

COP26 Thought for the Day #12

Awe and Wonder

“It’s my deep sense of wonder that keeps me hopeful.”

Alice Walker


It was pelting down. Fat silver drops that fall straight down to bounce and splatter, soaking shoes and trouser bottoms. The water flowed fast, bubbling along the gutters, skimming the top of the kerb and gurgling down drains. Shoppers huddled in shop doorways waiting for it to ease or hunched and hurried to whatever could not wait for the cloudburst to pass. I made my way up the steps of Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum to escape the rain.

On the floor plan I pick up there’s an invitation “Find your way or lose yourself”. I stuff it in my pocket and let my feet take me up the stairs, past the statue of Prince Albert where, ready to lose myself, I take a random left turn.

Disoriented, I feel like I’ve stepped back in time. On shelves specimens in ground glass jars are suspended in alcohol, there are old-fashioned mahogany display cases with neat labels. For a split second I’m in the Hancock Museum in Newcastle sixty years ago. A rare treat, just me and Dad. Every time we went I’d stand spellbound for what seemed hours, gazing into the eyes of the stuffed American bison.

Back in the present, in this museum, I’d stumbled into biologist Walter Percy Sladen’s study, unchanged since it was installed in 1910. It’s the home of his echinoderm collection – marine animals that include sea urchins and starfish.

I wander over to the shelves, examining the jars. Inside float delicate curling arms covered with fine hair that I discover are tube feet. In the centre, cases display dried starfish, all sizes, collected from all over the world. From Teignmouth just down the road, to New Zealand. The labels record the depth of the finds and the kind of mud; blue mud, volcanic mud, coral mud and gravel and stone. I wander absorbed, struck by their fivefold radial symmetry, I remember learning as a child that starfish have an amazing power – they can regenerate their limbs. Surprised by how moved I feel here, surrounded by what are after all dead specimens, I realise what is stirred in me is a sense of wonder at a vast otherness that puts my own small place in the world into perspective.

I glance up and see there are words written around the cornice. Craning my neck and turning around in the centre of the room I struggle to read; with no spaces and no punctuation and it takes a while for the letters to make sense:

“Look on the frame of this wide universe and therein read the endless kinds of creature which by name thou canst not count much less their natures aim which are made with wondrous wise respect and with admirable beauty deckt.”

Back home, I remember the sea urchin shell that sits on the windowsill of my office. Taking it in my hands, I turn it, running fingertips over the bumps where spines were anchored, tracing the delicate peachy-pink lines and darker mahogany stripes, seeing for the first time the curved fivefold symmetry, like a closed tulip. Here, in a room I work in most days; wonder rises again. Awe doesn’t require travel to distant lands. It does need space and time and perhaps, a willingness to meet life with openness.

I often find myself writing about what I think of as ‘micro-practices.’ A colleague once dismissed this as ‘Narnia’ irrelevant, not real world ‘work’. That was 15 years ago, but the barb still sticks. Last week, Chris Nichols, in his post ‘Reaching for the Stars,’ mentioned the time the CEO of his business school declared he was ‘away with the fairies.’ I smiled when I read that, taking comfort in knowing I wasn’t alone. Smiles aside, I still carry a secret, lurking fear ridicule.

Nevertheless, I want to take a stand for these glimpses of another way of experiencing my place in the world. The world needs more awe not less. Specifically, the wonder that rises in response to the natural world, transforming the way we understand the world.

As COP26 moves into its final days, my thoughts turn to Sir David Attenborough’s opening address. His sense of wonder, his capacity to engage and marvel has touched millions, opening a crack where love for the natural world can enter. Awe matters because the more we lose our capacity to be awestruck, the easier it is to look down on the world with superior, self-centred over-confidence.

Wonder is an antidote for the self-absorption that creeps up when I become too busy, speedy, preoccupied or fixated on personal concerns. A few moments at the end of the day breathing cool air and looking at the stars, a cup of coffee on a bench where I can smell honeysuckle and listen to bees, or pausing to watch the birds on the feeder outside the kitchen window – these presences work together to soften and melt a tendency to see myself as the centre of my own universe.

The lines in Sladen’s study are from ‘An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty by Edmund Spenser.

COP26 Thought for the Day #11

Cutting Leeks

Todays thought for the day comes from Pat Fleming. Pat works in conservation education, and currently teaches and mentors on the ‘Call of the Wild’ courses at Schumacher College. She co-authored ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, a deep ecology reader with John Seed, Arne Naess and Joanna Macy and has led groups in deep ecology and ‘Work that Reconnects’ for over 30 years.

Cutting Leeks as COP26 opens

I stand by the compost heap, bottom of our Dartmoor garden,
wielding an old bone-handled knife,
slicing muddy white roots off long fat leeks
just heaved from the earth.

Above the pines, in the evening’s apricot sky
the mewling of a young buzzard, high-pitched,
insistent, cuts through the quiet. Alarmed, alone.

I carry on dropping leek tops into warm wormy compost,
a tangle of rotting leaves-peelings-weeds-paper
that yield such blessing, keep our garden in good heart.

Suddenly from the south, a wide-winged buzzard
swoops over my head, feather tips swish air down my neck.
It’s heading home, the Dart valley woods nearby.
I try to call back, but my language is lacking.

At this moment, five hundred miles north, there’s a buzzing of heads of state,
COP 26 opens to address our broken world,
important people talking serious turkey in Glasgow,
calling each other out, making more promises to be broken.

I would be there, I wanted to be there, for my alarm cries to be heard
by someone, anyone, maybe no-one. But at least like the young buzzard,
give everything for my voice to cry out.

But I didn’t get on that train, or sleep on the floor of friends,
nor stand in a windy wet street handing out leaflets,
maybe dressed as a turtle, or a puddle, or indeed anything
that wants its voice heard in the melee.

Instead I slice the last leek, satisfied with their perfect long shafts,
marvel how anyone would love them, sweet, lightly steamed.

Boris rattles on the 6 pm radio about “The last chance saloon”
as if he’s some sheriff in a dodgy ole western,
rattling his spurs, cocking his pistol, to save the world.
Why does he sound so hollow, so desperate to project gravitas,
whilst wearing a cowboy hat?

I hear the Island nations – Pilau, Philippines, Pacific, whose women speak
so eloquently, passionately, concisely, about what needs to happen
“Or we will get angry!”

Actually we are already angry, very angry. I wave my knife.
Angry at my species, in our stupified thrall of stuff,
turned away from our legacy, from future generations
whose soil and sea and air we hold in our hands,
within our smallest of actions. Angry how
our endless reckless hunger is more important
than the magnanimous recognition of our belonging,
of all our belonging.

Deep down, aren’t we, like young buzzards, mewling for home,
for safe places to rest and return? No need to holler any more,
but to quietly embrace, be embraced, belong.

Pat Fleming
1st November 2021

COP26 Thought for the Day #10

Salmon, Systems and Survival

It’s that time of year, time for the salmon run.  This year I almost forgot.

Every year I wait for a few days of heavy rain , that’s when salmon surge upstream heading for the gravely shallows where they were spawned. Many will die after, but not all.

When he was nine or ten, I’d collect my son from school, and we’d head for the salmon leap to watch them hurl their bodies at the falls. Cheering whenever we saw one, close enough to see the shimmering copper-pink and silver scales. Then another and another; sometimes as many as fifty in less than an hour, sometimes only one or two.  I remember him saying “I like breathing the air here.” Sweet, moist, cool and rich with autumn smells. We would sit side by side in silence for a long time, sharing flapjacks and a thermos of hot chocolate, bearing witness until the light faded.

That was fifteen years ago. How much longer will the salmon return to our watershed spawn? I wanted my son to see, so he could carry their story in his memory. I’d say “some people go their whole lives and never see this” and he would laugh, because every year I repeated the same words.

Though they seem numerous, around the world salmon populations are collapsing, all Devon’s rivers have seen a substantial decline. The reasons are various and systemic; overfishing in the Atlantic West Greenland, Faeroese and Irish Costal fisheries; poaching locally; pollutants from agricultural run off; contamination from treated sewage;  escaped farmed salmon weakening the genetic strains of wild salmon; escaped farmed trout competing for habitat; pests and diseases from farmed stock infecting wild fish; alien invasive weeds leading to too much or too little shade along the riverbanks; ocean pollution and of course warmer waters brought by climate change. A fragile balance being broken.

This place asks for engagement with issues that takes me far beyond one species in one river. The flourishing of the salmon can only be understood in terms of patterns and networks of relationships, connectedness and processes. There is a whole community of embedded relationships: the ecosystem of the river; the bioregion; the oceans; the biosphere. 

The recognition at the COP26 talks last week that the climate change and biodiversity are intertwined crises is welcome, but it’s also shocking that they could ever have been thought separate.

Relationships and context don’t lend themselves to our conventional scientific framework, rooted as it is in a world of measurable and quantifiable things. Though quantitative knowledge is essential, the qualitative, subjective, interpretive, artful, poetic, imaginative and exploratory is so often neglected. Unfortunately, analytical thinking can only take us so far. Systems evolve, change, develop, grow and transform, we need to look deeply at relationships.

Every year at this time, others are drawn to the salmon leap.  Stopping, listening and watching. We stand sharing a sense of wonder, touching the spirit and magic of the place. I play with the notion that each in our own way we are answering an echo in our soul, a temporary softening of tired old ways of seeing and feeling, leaving us, for a few moments, more permeable; open to a world that is alive and awake and aware.  The roar of the weir, the salmon, the falling leaves and soft air speak a language we are briefly able to understand.

When Gregory Bateson spoke of consciousness, beauty and the sacred as an ‘aesthetic’ I wonder if he meant this resonance with place; a recognition of the relationships between things, the ways place acts upon us; a mutual responsiveness, encompassing not only biological interdependencies but also heart and mind.

It’s often argued that community involvement leads to protection and care of a bioregion, might this ripple outward from these moments at the salmon leap? When I’m full of doubt and leaning towards despair I fear we simply don’t have time for the subtle, gentle and less obvious action which might flow from here. It’s not enough, much more is demanded of us. As a friend put it last week, only partly in jest “I feel like I should be out there, gluing myself to a motorway.”

Then again, I also see how a culture of haste infects our personal, social and political worlds. There is unrelenting pressure to decide, react and act and not enough time to engage with the complexity of life. Perhaps the urgency is so great we don’t have the time not to go slowly.

COP26 Thought for the Day #9

Climate Crisis as a Spiritual Path

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment is not that we are on the way to destroying our world–we’ve actually been on the way quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millenia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves, and to each other.”


In the 4th of these COP26 posts I mentioned Joanna Macy – environmental activist, author, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She describes her work as aiming to “engage and expand people’s moral imagination, bringing wider perspectives on our world, while fostering both compassion and creativity.” That has certainly been my experience of being with her.


It’s 35 years since we first met on a course she was running in Cumbria, an early workshop where she was experimenting with rituals like the Council of All Beings and developing work that would later spread around the world. Then, our concern was the nuclear threat – this was during the Cold War. In the years that followed I facilitated alongside her a couple of times, participated in her trainings whenever I could, and occasionally bumped into her at conferences, the last time was back in 2009.

Meeting her was a pivotal moment in my life, I’d just completed my training in psychosynthesis, the following year I went on my first retreat with Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. The combination set the trajectory for pretty much everything I’ve done since! Although I moved on from facilitating Joanna’s work here in the UK, her influence remained, finding its way into my approach both explicitly and implicitly.


But the time I remember most warmly, was when she and her husband Fran stayed at our house. It was 1998. In our conservatory, Fran hosted a meeting with activists protesting against the transport of MOX nuclear fuel in Europe. Joanna was ‘off duty’, just hanging out. I was very pregnant, my son arrived a couple of weeks later. Nothing much happened. I don’t remember what we talked about, in fact I don’t think we talked that much. Joanna went walking on the moors. It was May. The sun shone. We drank tea and coffee. Cooked together. Ate together. Ordinary, everyday things.

Joanna is over 90 now and her fierce, passionate, bright spirit shines through as powerfully as ever in this video.

COP26 Thought for the Day #8

River

Today Peter Reason shares his practice of asking deeper questions, not only about what we do but how we experience ourselves.

Peter is a writer and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bath, where he co-founded the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice. I was a participant on this pioneering programme, the collaborative, experiential and action-oriented forms of inquiry deeply informed my practice as a coach and later, the development of Wise Goose. Since retiring his focus has been linking the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical and spiritual sources. We need, he believes, to discover whole new ways to be a modern human.

As part of my ongoing inquiry, and specifically a current cooperative inquiry with sentient Rivers, I drive early to my regular Spot where I have been sitting these last months.

It’s very dark, very wet. The sky is murky, colourless. I wonder to myself what kind of an idiot would be out in heavy rain like this on a Sunday morning when the clocks have gone back, and everybody is supposed to appreciate that they get an extra hour in bed. But you can’t just visit river at those times when it’s beautiful for humans! I leave the car and trudge across the field. About halfway across I realize I am not attending but rushing, as if achieving something against the elements. So I slow down and start to walk more intentionally, not just getting to a place but taking it more like a pilgrimage.

I have my first glimpse of the Frome flowing below me, glistening in what little light there is. A few yards further and the narrow peninsular between the Frome and Avon is in front of me. Many more leaves have fallen since I was last here just a week ago, so the place feels open and naked and slippery, a touch dangerous.

I bow and introduce myself, “Good morning Rivers, Good morning River, this is Peter, Wolfheart, D* come with thanks for the teaching of a few days ago which has affected me profoundly. I come with no expectations. I come to pay my respects”.

I call the Four Directions. To my surprise I find myself praying for success in the COP negotiations taking place in Glasgow. “I call the powers of the East. I call for illumination, for the spark of new life. I call, particularly at this time, for new visions of how we can create a stable climate or, I should say, stop destabilizing the climate of the planet. I call Fire. I call the masculine… I call the power of the West, Grandmother Earth. I call the deep feminine, introspection and intuition. I call the bones of the world, you who take the new spark from the east and ground it, make it real.

At this time with the COP conference, we humans need to make our speculative plans into something real…. I call the power of the South. I call emotions. I call water. I call everything that flows. I ask that we may learn to harness our emotions, our emotions of fear, our emotions of hope to bring these together in creating a new human world that’s in harmony with the greater whole. I ask we do this for the children, for all the children… I call the power of the North. I call for that intelligence that links heart and mind, that draws the other powers together. I call on the fourfooted ones to show us how to do this. I call with passion; I call for your help this morning. Here I am, just visiting River and hopefully in some small way adding to the work of the larger whole. Blessed be.”

I scramble down nearer the water. It’s still really dark. What I can mainly hear is the raindrops falling on my umbrella. In all my gear comfortably warm and dry hands a bit wet there’s a wind outside. I pour my tea and make an offer to river, like the Aboriginal elder throwing a handful of sand to show her seriousness with the River. I may have no plans, no expectations, no ceremony; but I feel I am here in all seriousness and all joy. And now I am here I feel it’s absolutely right. Absolutely right.

The water flows in the ripples and eddies create a texture on the surface which reflects the lightening sky in a kind of dark silver. And there’s that owl again

I sit and watch River. A dark mystery of the water flowing and taking the rain back to the sea (and unfortunately taking all our shit and waste back to the sea as well). I sing the Morning Song to River, drumming on my thigh to the heartbeat. I don’t ask for much; I am just sitting alongside River companionably as you might with a human person.

I thank the Four Directions and walk back to the car.

COP26 Thought for the Day #7

Reaching for the Stars

Today Chris Nichols shares a thought for the day. Chris is co-founder of GameShift an FT ranked leading management consultancy.

One of the blessings of teaching at Schumacher College over the years was that I got to work with Brian Goodwin. Brian was a pioneer in the field of theoretical mathematical biology, and he took on a “post-retirement” role at Schumacher teaching complexity theory. He wrote many things in his life, including his elegant and piercing later-life reflection on our human crisis on this earth, Nature’s Due.

Every now and then I’d do a double act with him, applying complexity thinking to organisational activity. I was astonishingly fortunate to have the chance to learn from him at close hand. He once said a sentence to me that I’ve never forgotten: “always remember that human systems in crisis tend towards control”.

How right he was.

As the world converges on Glasgow I don’t know whether to be hopeful or terrified, and so I find myself to be both.

I am hopeful because I genuinely do feel that something has shifted. I first worked in energy conservation in 1983, back when it was government policy to encourage energy use. The privatisations of both gas and electricity were based on supporting a growing energy demand.

Almost three decades on in 2010, when I introduced some of my Schumacher inspired teachings into the business school where I worked, the CEO declared that both Schumacher and I were “away with the fairies”. How far off the mark was that! There were fantasies around all right, and they were principally the fantasies of infinite growth and endless cheap energy.

That tide seems to have turned. I am delighted to hear now, in 2021, a UK Prime Minister speak up on behalf of the living earth, and of our generational obligation to act for the well-being of earth systems and for the sake of tomorrow’s generations.

But at the same time, I am terrified.

These same governments are in many ways showing exactly the tendency towards tight central control that Brian Goodwin warned about. We are seeing systemic crises piling up, from financial meltdowns to climate turmoil, from COVID to global trade. People are afraid and in response we are seeing the rise of polarisation, binary thinking and “tough man” heroic leadership.

I hope we won’t see a COP meeting filled with posturing heroes, making grand claims whilst acting for smaller interests. I also hope we don’t witness a COP of diktat and control.

Ultimately our climate crisis isn’t a “thing in itself”, it’s a symptom. A sign of a world out of balance, a forgetting that we too are the living world. Small politics, nationalistic battles, pitting “us” against “them”, all are part of the same problem.

What we need from COP is both action AND inclusion, commitment, AND engagement.

It will take more than the will of governments to recreate a sane understanding of humanity’s place on this earth. We need bigger solutions, and these will always need collaboration, a will to find ways to work together, however hard that is.

I am inspired in this by the work of past students, from both Schumacher and the marvellous (but now lost) Bath and Ashridge MSc degrees in sustainable and responsible business. People like Jon Alexander working to invite people to move from being consumers to be becoming active citizens; Daniella Vega who is Senior VP Health and Sustainability at global food producer Ahold Delhiaze, working to promote earth intelligent action at all levels of the company’s activities; Mashudu Romano, an energy and water entrepreneur looking to create universal provision in southern Africa; and Andres Roberts and his colleagues in the Bio-Leadership Project, working to create new ways of leading that see beyond the myth of human activity as separate from life.

What gives me hope is not that these are the exceptions, but that they are examples among many.  There is little time, but we now have many talented people pouring their skill and energy into creating a change where once there were so few. There is more action now, and action by many is where hope lies.

Schumacher ecologist Stephan Harding tells this story.  When Brian Goodwin was dying in his hospital bed, a nurse saw him stretching up his arms. She asked him what he was doing. “I am reaching for the stars” he said.

That’s where I see myself as I write this. I am an older man now, in my sixties. I have worked to promote sustainability and earth intelligent business for decades, and mostly during my lifetime the news has not been good. Yet I look at the people converging on COP 26 and I am hopeful. If we can reach beyond our inclination to split and blame others, beyond our smaller views, there is a deeper energy for a real change. I feel it in the voices, and I see it in the actions of people now much younger than me.

I see all this, and like Brian I reach for the stars.

Reaching for the stars

By Chris Nichols, co-founder of GameShift

One of the blessings of teaching at Schumacher College over the years was that I got to work with Brian Goodwin. Brian was a pioneer in the field of theoretical mathematical biology, and he took on a “post-retirement” role at Schumacher teaching complexity theory. He wrote many things in his life, including his elegant and piercing later-life reflection on our human crisis on this earth, Nature’s Due.

Every now and then I got to do a double act with him, applying complexity thinking to organisational activity. I was astonishingly fortunate to have the chance to learn from him at close hand. He once said a sentence to me that I’ve never forgotten: “always remember that human systems in crisis tend towards control”.

How right he was.

As the world converges on Glasgow I don’t know whether to be hopeful or terrified, and so I find myself to be both.

I am hopeful because I genuinely do feel that something has shifted. I first worked in energy conservation in 1983, back when it was government policy to encourage energy use. The privatisations of both gas and electricity were based on supporting a growing energy demand.

Almost three decades on in 2010, when I introduced some of my Schumacher inspired teachings into the business school I then worked in, the CEO of the school declared that both Schumacher and I were “away with the fairies”. How far off the mark was that! There were fantasies around all right, and they were principally the fantasies of infinite growth and endless cheap energy.

That tide seems to have turned. I am delighted to hear now, in 2021, a UK Prime Minister speak up on behalf of the living earth, and of our generational obligation to act for the well-being of earth systems and for the sake of tomorrow’s generations.

But at the same time, I am terrified.

These same governments are in many ways also showing exactly the tendencies towards tight central control that Brian Goodwin warned about. We are seeing systemic crises piling up, from financial meltdowns to climate turmoil, from COVID to global trade. People are afraid and in response we are seeing the rise of polarisation, binary thinking and “tough man” heroic leadership.

I hope we won’t see a COP meeting filled with posturing heroes, making grand claims whilst acting for smaller interests. I also hope we don’t witness a COP of diktat and control.

Ultimately our climate crisis isn’t a “thing in itself”, it’s a symptom. A sign of a world out of balance, forgetting that we too are the living world. Small politics, nationalistic battles, pitting “us” against “them”, is all part of the same problem.

What we need from COP is both action AND inclusion, commitment, AND engagement. It will take more than the will of governments to recreate a sane understanding of humanity’s place on this earth. I hope we will find leaders who understand that pitting one part of humanity against another is an easy popularity to achieve but too small a scale of victory. We need bigger solutions, and these will always need collaboration, a will to find ways to work together, however hard that is.

I am inspired in this by the work towards this agenda by of some our past students, from both Schumacher and from the marvellous (but now lost) Bath and Ashridge MSc degrees in sustainable and responsible business. People like Jon Alexander working to invite people to move from being consumers to be becoming active citizens; Daniella Vega who is Senior VP Health and Sustainability at global food producer Ahold Delhiaze, working to promote earth intelligent action at all levels of the company’s activities; Mashudu Romano, an energy and water entrepreneur looking to create universal provision in southern Africa; and Andres Roberts and his colleagues in the Bio-Leadership Project, working to create new ways of leading that see beyond the myth of human activity as separate from life.

What gives me hope is not that these are the exceptions, but that they are now examples among many.  There is little time, but we now have many talented people pouring their skill and energy into creating a change where once there were so few. There is a lot more action, and action by many is where the hope lies.

Schumacher ecologist Stephan Harding tells this story.  When Brian Goodwin was dying in his hospital bed, a nurse saw him stretching up his arms. She asked him what he was doing. “I am reaching for the stars” he said.

That’s where I see myself as I write this. I am an older man now, in my sixties. I have worked to promote sustainability and earth intelligent business for decades, and mostly during my lifetime the news has not been good. Yet I look at the people converging on COP 26 and I am hopeful. If we can reach beyond our inclination to split and blame others, beyond our smaller views, there is a deeper energy for a real change. I feel it in the voices, and I see it in the actions of people now much younger than me.

I see all this, and like Brian I reach for the stars.

COP26 Thought for the Day #6

What does it mean to ‘Act Now’?

Continuing with bringing in other voices, today Rob Porteous shares his thought for the day. Rob is a counsellor, environmental activist, poet and dancer.

In the place where I expect to find the Extinction Rebellion stall a man and his son are selling African masks. He points over my shoulder to the table I’m looking for, flanked by banners saying ‘No Future in Fossil Fuels,’ and ‘Climate Emergency,’ and ‘Act now.’

I lock my bike up to the railings alongside the harbour, take out my home-made sign, ‘Tell me how you feel about climate change,’ and drape it over my back. Then with clipboard and pen in hand, and a selection of postcards, I step out across the old railway lines of the harbour side and begin. We’re inviting people to write a short message to someone in power- Boris Johnson, for example, or Marvin Rees, Bristol’s mayor- and we’ll make sure it gets to them.

Some post cards have pictures of floods in different parts of the world, and people being evacuated from their homes. Others are spring green, with a line drawing of a heart or a clenched fist, and a caption saying ‘Take heart’ or ‘Show courage.’

The area is busy, with lots of people strolling or hurrying about, and others eating and drinking outside in the cafes of what is known variously as Wapping Warf or Gaol Ferry Steps. A few years ago this land between the New Cut and the Harbour (created when Brunel altered the course of the Avon and built the lock gates of Cumberland Basin) was derelict and empty. Now it’s a thriving centre of activity, which has presumably netted the developers a great deal of money.

Behind me, the cranes at the harbour’s edge remind me of the area’s industrial past. This is where ships set off as part of the triangular trade in trinkets, slaves, tobacco and sugar between England, Africa and the West Indies. This also is where John Cabot set out on his voyage on the Matthew in 1495 that led him to Newfoundland. A replica of his boat is moored nearby, and from time to time I can hear tourists clanging the ship’s bell.

The trade that’s sprung up now is different, but still part of our insatiable need to travel and explore the world. The climate crisis has been a long while in the making, and the underlying energy that created it seems to continue unabated.

Some of the people I accost with my ‘Tell me how you feel about climate change’ hurry wordlessly past, or say, ‘I’ve got no time.’ But quite a few say they are scared; and a surprising number are willing to stop and talk. A family from Glasgow tell me all about recycling in the town. A girl points to the picture of a heart, saying, ‘I like that one,’ when her mum is debating which postcard to write on. A man from Morocco tells me about drought in his country. A forester goes into detail about the correct management of woodland.

When people ignore my approach I notice my half-embarrassed smile at their retreating backs. But I love the unexpected insights that come up in the conversations that occur. I’m hear to listen and respond, not tell people what I think they should do.

As I stand there I reflect on what it means to ‘Act now.’ In XR some people talk about ‘spicy’ actions, eye-catching events that grab the headlines, with simple messages like ‘Insulate Britain.’ I notice my sense that the time for that is past. This too is an action, I tell myself.

Every day now there is something on the news about climate change, some confirmation of the direction in which we are heading, and some statement about becoming ‘carbon neutral’ by 2030 or 40 or 50, whatever that may mean.

There are agreements, as there have been in the past, to halt deforestation in places like Indonesia or Brazil, and to re-forest our countryside here. Meanwhile we continue to cut down more trees to make way for palm oil plantations or cattle farms; and I, presumably, continue to buy products with palm oil in them when I don’t scrutinise the ingredients.

So what can we do? What does it mean to ‘Act now,’ individually and collectively? My answer is to keep listening, keep tuning in to what people feel, keep trying to uncover the energy that drives our behaviour, and reflecting on how that might change.

I’ve been surprised and heartened by the many creative ideas young people have. I’ve seen the concern that lies there, under our busy-ness, waiting for an opportunity to make itself felt; and the frustration with words that promise more than they deliver.

This listening, for me, is the antidote to the power of big corporations to dictate what we do. I’m reminded of the central image of the Tao, of how water, over time, wears away stone, and the enigmatic sentence in John Heider’s The Tao of leadership: ‘Do nothing, and everything that is needful will be done.’

COP26 Thought for the Day #5

What is the difference that will make the difference?

Now that COP26 is well underway I wanted to bring in other voices and perspectives, Today I’d like you to meet Sally Gray. I asked Sally to say something about her work with COP26, as well as sharing her thought for the day.

Sally is a student on the Wise Goose advanced coaching course. She’s been committed to societal and organisational change for many years, particularly at the inter-section of people and sustainability.

Sally focuses on shifting ‘systems’ in large and complex organisations and on building more responsible organisations working at all levels – individual, group, organisation and societal – to enable transformational learning and change.

Currently a Director at EY (Ernst & Young – one of the ‘Big 4’ audit and consulting firms) specialising in Talent and Sustainable Finance, she also teaches Sustainable Finance at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). In addition to her work (and coaching), Sally is often found on the allotment with a reluctant nine-year old.

Sally and COP26

With my latest project I have been involved in the biggest system ‘shift’ of them all in some ways – I have been assembling and driving EY’s Sustainable Finance contribution to COP26. Our presence at COP26 has taken several forms including the development and mobilisation of the Green Horizon Summit, a collaboration between the City of London and the Green Finance Institute, supported by several strategic sponsors, including EY.

My focus has been developing insights to feed into the debate about the role of private finance in addressing climate change, including bringing together the likes of the CEO of Bank of America to discuss mobilising capital to emerging markets, CEOs from around Asia to discuss decarbonisation from an Asian perspective; and assembling a ‘youth’ panel to hear the concerns and questions from the generation who will carry the burden of climate change.

I have never seen the business community mobilise behind a COP in such a substantial way. The number of large Financial Services firms queuing up to call for change – both within themselves, from governments, regulators, and their customers – is incredible. I think we all have doubts if these aspirations and targets can be achieved. These NetZero targets and talk need to be backed up by clear and swift action.

My sense is – if we can’t use this moment to galvanise the start of significant change – we never will.

What we need is to listen deeply to each other and find our individual ways to take action –for ourselves, our organisations, our communities. Purpose is central to this change. What is our Financial Services industry in service of? How can we reimagine an FS industry in service of humanity and our wider ecosystem? What are we in our respective roles and lives in service of? How can we all play our part?

Thought for the Day

The pathway to a globally just transition is tough and controversial. There are likely to be losses and grief as we must shed old behaviours and patterns of consumption and production. There may be cause for optimism and joy as we discover we can change and innovate. There will be differences of perspective. To reach the target ahead, there is not only a space for differences, there’s a need for them. And more importantly, we need space to listen and reflect on our own and others experience of our past, present and future.

As part of the run up to COP26, the infamous TED Talks invited the CEO of Shell, Ben van Beurden; Chris James, founder of Engine No. 1 – an activist fund; and Lauren MacDonald, a Scottish activist and a member of the Stop Cambo campaign.

This exchange – one with deep pain expressed – reminded me of the Gregory Bateson phrase “The difference that makes the difference”. Bateson was talking about information and how the information we have can affect our perspectives, situations, and actions. The difference is the space between – and if both parties can better understand the space between and our differences, a subtle shift can make a huge difference.

As governments, NGOs and businesses gather in COP26 – what is the difference that will make the difference? Can we each make shifts in our perspective that allow us to grieve our pasts and embrace a new future?

It will require deep listening, pain and hope. It will not be easy and it will not be straightforward, but we can and must achieve this transformation together.